Editing Gradients and Textures

If you paint a zone with a gradient or texture colour, you can use the Edit Gradient/Texture tool to modify its position in the zone. You can move, scale, rotate and skew. If you want to match the colour to the animation, set the first texture position and copy the Edit Gradient/Texture position. When moving to the next drawing, you can select the next texture and paste the previous position to continue the modifications.

If you are painting a hand-drawn animation or if your want the Brush tool and Paint tool to use your gradient’s position, angle and scale settings instead of the default ones, you can store your own settings and reuse them afterward.

This way of editing a texture using the Edit Gradient/Texture tool also works with pencil lines drawn with textured “brushes”. If you then paint your textured pencil line with a gradient, you can do so and then edit both elements independently at the same time.

Click on the pencil line to be modified to bring up its contour envelope.

Select one of the contour points around the envelope and move its position to change the size of the tiled texture or gradient. You can also pull directly on the lines of the contour envelope or play with the Bezier handles of any given point in order to continue to modify the envelope form.

Expanding the width of the envelope parallel to the pencil line’s central vector will cause the tiled texture to be stretched. Conversely, reducing the envelope’s width will cause the tiled texture to look squashed.

Reducing the contour’s width perpendicular to the pencil line’s central vector will reduce the number of tiles, while expanding it will increase the number of tiled images.

This editing technique does not just work on texture fills, but can also be applied to pencil lines drawn with a textured “brush”.

Click on the pencil line to be modified to bring up the editor controls.

The editor controls delineate a single tile in the texture. For gradients, this is less applicable. Pull on the top of the editor controls to stretch the tiled texture throughout the length of the stroke.

As gradients are parallel to the stroke’s central vector, this will stretch the way that the gradient is distributed in the pencil line’s envelope. The envelope still acts as a boundary for the texture or gradient.

Drag the editor control perpendicular to the stroke. You will feel it glide along the strokes central vector line. This is another way to resize the texture tile. Instead of stretching or shrinking it vertically, this motion stretches or shrinks it vertically. As gradients are parallel to the pencil line’s central vector, stretching them vertically gives no visual result.